"The Revery Alone Will Do, If Bees Are Few"

carpet cleaning

I was hired for my current organizing position close to a year ago. I was living down in the southeastern corner of SoDak at the time, and initially I was hired as a lobbyist, so getting the job basically meant I had to up and move to Pierre the following week.

But, the organizer part of my job post legislative session required me to relocate somewhere closer to the Brookings office. And that meant getting my finances in order and house-hunting on weekends in between the madness of legislative weekdays.

My budget being what it is (and my entourage including a weekend teenager, a large dog, and a grumpy cat), Brookings itself was out of the question. I scoped out a few places in surrounding communities, and found the sweet spot in Toronto–where the population and property prices are low, the yards are big, and “urban” agriculture is a given.

I closed on a good-sized place with 1/3 acre–not as big of a lot as I wanted, but looking back I’m relieved I didn’t hold out for something even more time-consuming to maintain. And I moved in and got started at my organizing duties pretty much immediately upon returning from Pierre in the spring.

The compressed time frame meant that instead of doing the whole Rug Doctor dance, I gave the place a good vacuuming and then carried my stuff in the door. For those who recoil in horror at this–well, what kind of timeframe and more importantly what kind of help do you have going for you? The place looked decent enough; it didn’t stink; I moved in and got my butt to work.

Fast forward to the end of the first year. With the house closed up for winter, I notice that the furnace filter needs changing pretty often. There’s a kind of mustiness which is probably emanating from the dug-out basement (mine is the second-oldest house in Toronto, I’m told), but, you know, the carpets.

As awesome as my vacuum is (and it is super-cyclonic!), there’s no real substitute for a machine designed to get down in there and suck up as many years of gunk as is possible without ripping up the floor coverings entirely. When I saw the opportunity for a few days off toward the end of the year, I also saw the opportunity to do the spring cleaning I didn’t have time to do this year, and I won’t likely have time for next year, either.

The first two calls I made to price renting a machine led me to one quick realization: the majority of people must either have a lot of stamina or very little carpet. Who rents a Rug Doctor for one day? In my case, two carpeted bedrooms and a hall upstairs, the actual stairs, plus the living room and office on the main floor were not going to get clean in one day. And probably not two.

Maybe when normal people do their deep cleaning, it’s not that deep. I’m not a neat-freak (I let things go–and go–and go), but I grew up in a cleanliness-next-to-godliness household, which means that when I do deep cleaning, not only does the place really, really need it, I know how to get in there and do it like a gal who’s had warnings about doing a “half-assed job” worked into her brain from infancy. If I’m going to rent a carpet cleaner, I’m going to rent it for a week because I intend to make every inch of that carpet forget it has a history.

Ahem.

So, the third call was to a rental center in town. I asked if they rented “Rug Doctors” because I guess I thought that was shorthand for a carpet cleaner the way that “Kleenex” is shorthand for facial tissue. I got corrected on that, but in the process of the explanation of the difference between machines, I learned that they had a commercial hot water extractor machine, and I sorta decided that if I was going to do this thing I was going to do it like a professional. A professional on staycation.

This sucker is big, it’s awkward, and it was absolute hell to get out of my car, onto my deck, and to lift-and-push one step at a time up the steep and cornered staircase to the second floor. It has two long cords I was advised to plug into separate circuits in my house to avoid blowing a fuse.

Yes, I have some fuses. I also have some circuit breakers. Maybe you have a hybrid car. I have a hybrid house.

I dragged all the furniture out of the first room. Luckily, I have one bedroom upstairs that is not carpeted, so I crammed everything in there. I crammed it more tightly when I realized that as I cleaned my way down the carpeted hallway, I’d have to back into that room with the machine and all of its hoses in order to do the landing at the top of the stairs.

I checked the fuse box map and figured out where to plug in the vacuum and spray line separate from the tank heater line. I filled the tank and measured the cleaning solution. I turned the machine on; the vacuum was sucking like Nebraska, the sprayer was blowing like North Dakota (this is the punchline to a joke about why it’s windy in South Dakota). The tank heater was…kaput.

I checked everything over again. In part because I really wanted it to work and in part because, as a woman, I knew the kinds of questions I would likely get from any man who answered the phone at the rental place. Questions suggesting that I lack a basic understanding of machinery and electrical systems and that the failure of the machine to operate was a failure on my part.

Studies have shown that being able to answer those kinds of questions before they’re asked is a safe and effective way to reduce your blood pressure and also avoid ripping someone’s head off.

On closer inspection, I could see that the protective cover on the tank heater switch was missing, and that there was moisture inside the clear inner part of the switch. Bingo. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t going to work no matter where I plugged it in. I hashed out the problem with the rental place (and sent them a picture), and they suggested that, if I didn’t want to drag that thing down the stairs, load it in my vehicle, and drive the 50-mile round trip back to the store (and then try to find someplace else to rent one), I could simply heat the water on my stove top and pour it in the tank.

The reservoir on this machine is 5 gallons. The machine is upstairs. The stove top is in the kitchen on the main floor. Umm…no.

So, another thing I learned on my staycation this year is how to crank up my water heater to the temperature that ground beef is supposed to be cooked. That’s 160 degrees–which is not as hot as the machine’s tank heater was supposed to get, but it’s hot enough to burn the heck out of your hand if you go to wash your dishes and forget you turned your water heater up that high.

I sat on a folding chair in the bathroom and filled buckets of scalding water with the shower head (low-flow, extra-slow) and finished the upstairs bedrooms and hall in two days. Tomorrow I put the upstairs furniture back in place and then start moving the office and living room furniture out of the way to do the next round of cleaning on the main floor.

The good thing about the professional hot water extractor is that it takes extraction seriously–very little water stays in the carpet, so it doesn’t take forever to dry. But it’s still not instantaneous, and with all the extra furniture from the carpeted bedrooms crammed in the guest room, it’s looking like I’ll be having another exciting staycation adventure tonight…